The 4th wave

S/4HANA 2025 is released. This release marks the 10^th year of the S/4HANA product – count starts with 1511 – and with this the long running endeavor of SAP customers to migrate from their business suite / ECC to S/4HANA. S/4HANA 2025 will be one of the more important releases. It will be the one most customers will target to migrate to. The end of normal support for business suite is 2027. The 2025 release is therefore the last one customers can migrate to in a somewhat planned manner and without having to go for extended support. For customers that are going to miss the 2027 deadline, the 2025 release is going to be the one used to start their journey to S/4HANA. For those customers that have already started to use S/4HANA: extended support for S/4HANA 2017 to 2020 ends in 2025. They either already adopted S/4HANA 2021/22/23 or are going to update to S/4HANA 2025. And even customers already on S/4HANA 2021/22/23, it makes sense to update to S/4HANA 2025. As you can see, S/4HANA 2025 will be important.

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Therefore, the number of SAP customers using S/4HANA 2025 will count for the largest S4 user base. Good news is that – at least for developers – the S/4HANA 2025 is way better than earlier releases. The benefit a developer can get from S/4HANA 2025 is impressive. The problem I see is: we are now entering the 4^th wave. And I am not convinced that SAP (and customers and partners) are ready for this.

4^th wave

What is the 4^th wave? Think of the 4^th industrial revolution. While for companies’ technology isn’t an option any longer, the same applies now to S/4HANA adoption for SAP customers and professionals. Depending on when customers and with them the main part of their developers, users and partners are adopting S/4HANA, it is possible to categorize them in waves.

1^st wave: These are (super) early adopters. Hand-picked customers by SAP. Those are the ones that work so closely with SAP during the development that they implemented a S/4HANA release when it is not even released. Think of the cliché of customer C-level playing golf with SAP C-level because they need features as early as possible. Companies and people in the 1^st wave are the happy users. There are attention, money and resources available. Overall, good access to SAP resources is available. The setup determines that there is a very limited number of people participating in the 1^st wave.

2^nd wave: This wave starts when the product is generally available, but most companies won’t use it as it is still too new. Yet, as the product is new, projects involving it attract motivated people inside and outside a company. People that want to learn, to gain experience with a new release. People that see working with the new, cool stuff as an opportunity. Those that have no problem in debugging the core and inform SAP about a bug found 15 levels down the code. Many issues are solved by the project team, workarounds are created or simply solved by accepting them as-is. What reaches the market and SAP is still the happy world.

3^rd wave: Companies understand that they must adopt sooner or later the product. The results from projects from waves 1 and 2 have shown how it works. “Experienced” people are now available, knowledge is shared and to some degree available. This is the wave where more projects are started, and “normal” people are entering. Yet, this is still not the main wave. The majority of customers, consultants and developers are still not working with the new release. Wave 3 is rather the time when the earliest and early adopter phase ends. From a people’s perspective, it is the ones that are trying actively to have their skills updated. People that do not want to work on the new product have plenty of alternatives available.

Feedback given back from wave 3 is starting to be more complex and out of the happy world. “Old” features that are gone or work differently are going to be demanded, as well as upgrade paths, migration wizards and tools. The focus from SAP is, however, more on the new features: the ones declared as innovation and a key reason to update. The number of customers and people working on wave 3 projects is still not overwhelmingly high. Companies might adopt e.g. S/4HANA here for a country, but not for their complete SAP ERP landscape. Wave 3 has impact on SAP Customers, however, it does this only to a small degree. It is more about laying out the foundation for the implementations to come.

The 4^th wave is where the average company and their workforce join. The proof of concepts, early adopter and test phases are over. The SAP customers that plan to go live before the maintenance deadline ends, not because they want, but because they must: legal requirements, budget, external demand. The happy phase ends. Now the big ERP system is going to be migrated. The ERP that ensures a company can pay bills, manufacture and ship goods and make money. The system that runs business critical processes is now targeted. Key and end users do not want disruption caused by a software update. In this wave a massive number of companies, including end users, key users, consultants and developers are affected.

There is one more wave: the 5^th wave. This wave includes the ones that are not adopting the product on time, or not at all. It is a small number of companies compared to wave 1 – 4. Companies in this wave see no sense in adopting the product. Maybe because they are migrating to another product or moving away from SAP, skip the release or cannot due to lack of resources.

The harsh reality

With this shift on project focus, the questions that come up now are totally different compared to wave 1, 2 and 3. The happy days are going to end. Here, the ERP system is seen as something that ensures people can do their job. To adopt something new, it must be as good or better than the old technology. Doing something because it is nerdy, cool or just because-it-is-possible is out of scope in wave 4.

For the business, the important question is: will the client pay for this? Do we have budget for this? Is this something to do during the maintenance and further development scope? How do you fit all this into the normal release schedule? How to do this without disrupting too much the daily business? You cannot expect support from the end-user side: they are used to working with what they were trained to use, to get their work done. Why change a running system? Why change a – proven, working, running as expected – process? Just because of some SAP update? And the key users and functional consultants? Even harder. Those might not even know what SAP standard is. And those roles are the ones that – in theory – should drive adoption of innovations.

S/4HANA, the 4^th wave includes almost all SAP customers that adopt S/4HANA until 2030, maybe 2033. As you can imagine, this is an impressive number of customers, but also partners that are part of wave 4. And with them, almost all technical and functional people are part of it: key users, end users, developers, freelancers, …

4^th wave problem

The biggest problem that comes with the 4^th wave is the lack of knowledge. The overall number of people that will now have for the first time contact with S/4HANA is enormous. This does not mean that they never heard of S/4HANA or Fiori or RAP, Mobile, BTP, or the functional features of it. But these people did not have the chance to work with S/4HANA. They do not have years of experience. They come with a huge skill gap to S/4HANA.

In wave 4 you find developers that might have some experience using ADT and Eclipse, but not much. Reports are still written on a daily basis in SE80. Custom OData services might not even exist. RAP was never a question as it was not available on their NetWeaver system. BTP might be available, however, for the wave 1 to 3 (innovation) projects. Even with a Fiori Launchpad available, SAP GUI is the go-to client. Key users and functional consultants, as said above, might not even know what SAP standard is or what kind of innovations come with S/4HANA. These are also not always a force of driving adoption of new technology.

The feedback provided is turning from feedback to feature demand. But not of the “would be nice to think about adding this”. Rather the “why is this not available?” and “how can you release a product without considering this use case?”. Migration and wizards are demanded that ensure that the old, working coding works with the new approach. Simply: tools that support the business process and developer. Not tools that the developer needs to support. Developers can expect that when they clean the cache, the cache is cleaned. Calling several transactions, reports, different environments, offer a sacrifice to Cthulhu just to see a change in a DEV (!!!!) system be applied and visible immediately? No, that’s not acceptable, not even negotiable for the 4^th wave developers. They are used to a different experience. Documentation must cover most use cases and not just the happy path and the beginners’ questions. Demand is for tutorials that go beyond the “how to get started” material.

Not ready

With the 4^th wave and the number of people now coming to S/4HANA, a crucial part is to ensure that these do not treat it as just another update. S/4HANA comes with benefits that need to be actively used. All the Fiori innovations bring nothing, when customers stick with SAP Gui. To be able to foster these innovations, everyone needs to be prepared. Everyone needs to be ready.

We are not ready. “We” as in: SAP is not ready. Partners are not ready. Customers are not ready. Freelancers are not ready. None of those is really ready for the wave of users and demand coming. The number of companies, developers and consultants forced to adopt S/4HANA is overwhelming. More or less everyone that is today working with SAP ERP – and does not quit, change jobs or retires – will be working with SAP S/4HANA in 2030+. We are talking about millions of people. You need a system that scales to enable all these people to work with S/4HANA. It needs tools to ensure that people can work with the new features. In a typical S/4HANA project workshops with users are planned to explore what S/4HANA offers for them. Over a few days users shall explore, understand, share and adopt their knowledge regarding their processes in S/4HANA. A few days, compared to decades in which the processes were shaped and people trained in them. It is not enough time to innovate on processes evolved over decades and that were digitalized in SAP ECC. What is the answer given by companies to solve this? Self-learning is provided as one of the main pillars to get ready.

SAP Learning

Learning will be key. Self-learning will be mandatory to ensure that people are skilled. Easy access to learning material is an important. SAP learning content is accessible for free. As SAP does understand that their software is sold to companies to run their processes and normal users are charged to do this. The problem: good luck finding your training. It is generic content, not tailored to a company or an individual person. To get started, filters are available, but do these match employees’ expectations? The training is about the SAP standard. Not how the SAP standard is used by customers.

One problem with these training courses will be the language. Not every user working in a business process in a certain language can understand the English term. They need training in their language. There are courses made available for S/4HANA end users by SAP. As not all content can be translated by a professional, SAP opted for automatic translation. This works more or less. The course texts are translated, the pictures, not. Not sure about your end users, but I doubt that this mixture is well received by most learners.

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Self-learning

The self-service part needs to improve. Or start being considered useful. Information must be available and findable. And not just for the happy path like most tutorials available. And it does not scale when the search results you find are for an old, maybe even outdated SAP release. It is common to get a Google search result for a simply SAP query pointing to an outdated release. And while it is nice to have access to learning content that covers several approaches on how to solve a problem, and explains all of them, even when only one is now recommended and only one applies to my system. So much talking about AI and all that is needed is an AI that tells me where to improve. If end users use an outdated process: give me the delta training. In case outdated transactions are used: tell me why and how to migrate to the new solution. If a developer is using old syntax or concepts: give me a delta training that fits exactly.

Tailored training

Self-learning is currently available for the motivated employee. This is still far away from helping the normal business user: language, individual learning journey, delta trainings, etc. Top of my head I know Espresso Tutorials that offers training for functional consultants. From what I have seen so far, their approach to easy to consume trainings for users and functional consultants is well received. There must be a reason why people opt to pay for their trainings instead of just using the freely available ones from SAP Learning. Different content? Better aligned to business tasks? Language? Format? Smaller content size? Less generic, or more generic? Better fit into work life?

What is currently available regarding training from SAP is good enough for wave 1 and 2, maybe 3, but not for wave 4. In the late 90’s, early 2000’s learning was different. That’s when companies adopted SAP en masse. Whole teams went to SAP training or to partners and when special learning curriculums and workshops were offered to mass-onboard partners and customers. In case your colleague entered the SAP universe around 2000, chances are good that the person will say that they attended some SAP training and boot camp. Try it for yourself: go to a colleague with no or little exposure to S/4HANA and ask them to find the training needed to upskill themselves. Best is to pick a functional consultant. Do not be surprised when they give up as they find nothing, do not find SAP learning (but do find SAP training) or ask you to help them find a training.

Learning is hard and when you must explore a new topic, it feels like hitting a wall. You do not know where to start, what to look for, what makes sense and what might be already obsolete. You need someone that shows you where to start, plan your journey. Just “throwing” tutorials at someone is more confusing than it helps. Guidance is needed. I cannot count how many times I encountered functional consultants going through Fiori content with a key user and the concept of pages and spaces was unknown. Or the many options to customize Fiori apps or knowing what the whole Fiori experience offers in recent releases. Honestly, those consultants were happy to have found content regarding Fiori that they were able to understand and use as a solution to their problem.

Where to look for help

Which brings me to another aspect where we are not ready: finding help. Surprisingly it is not better for developers than for other SAP professionals. Given the huge number of SAP professionals out there, there are not many trustworthy resources available that help to explain what to do. A resource pool including sites, people, tutorials to self-enable your to solve a problem you might have to deal with when going to S/4HANA. SCN might be considered a source for finding good content, but those days are gone. Not only because the number of active users shrunk over the last 10+ years. Content wise SCN is now not necessarily the best place to find high quality answers. Not dead yet, but no longer the (single) trusted source you go to for finding information. People moved on and you can now find content at other websites, be it personal or from companies, or on LinkedIn. You can even find SAP related content on Reddit or StackOverflow. The problem now is finding trustworthy sites and updated content. Not everyone is updating their site constantly or the blog posts to include new information for later releases. (yes, including myself. Guilty as charged)

Not finding an answer to questions demotivates. But what about hands-on learning? Over the last years, many tutorials have been created and made available. Updating content so it works for developers not being on the latest release – or being but the tutorial is outdated – with access to all the hyped technology is a challenge. And even when you have this kind of access: the tutorials focus mostly on the happy path. If your scenario is slightly more oriented at reality, you won’t get much value out of the tutorial.

Learning SAP is easier than 5 or 10 years ago. Material from TechEd or Sapphire is available on GitHub. Although it seems that this is getting less than during the Corona events. But content is available and new scenarios and features are added when a big SAP event is going to happen. Regarding trials, free tiers: nice try, but a disaster. Still available – at least for developers – the ABAP docker image. Let’s hope this gets updated to S/4 2025 soon. For those with money: CAL is a good resource.

Another way of learning is to go through the documentation. For some reasons, I surprisingly often get search results from Google that point me to some strange products like SAP GBT or SAP SNC on SAP Help. One is from 2013 the other from 2015. Searching content is too often knowing how to interpret the search results. Just for fun I searched Google for CDS views. First search result points me to SAP Help. NW ABAP 7.52. CDS view entity is available starting release 7.55 (S/4HANA 2020). Which explains why the SAP Help site does not mention CDS view entities. Chances are good that some developers are going to implement a CDS view in S/4HANA 2025. Not entity, not table. Just CDS view.

The lost chance

With this, the result is that all those people in wave 4 will go to S/4HANA and use it as an ECC system for the next years. That’s a lost chance for SAP and customers, partners, consultants, freelancers, users. For the whole SAP ecosystem.

Again, what is now coming to S/4HANA is not necessarily the type of person that sees no problem in doing SAP’s job and enjoys debugging SAP code to find out what the problem is. They are used to having their code working, that the code from SAP is working and they know how to solve a problem. And when they run into a problem, there are many, many resources available to them: colleagues, consultants, books, partners, training providers, the internet. The chance that someone ran into the same problem years ago and solved it and published it somewhere is close to 100%. When they write an ALV report: no problem. When they want to do the same using modern SAP technology: it is a challenge. Result: the preferred solution will be to use old, outdated technology.

Even when a customer is on S/4HANA, do not expect much innovation. Innovation still needs to be demanded by business, their users and key users. S/4HANA innovations must be known to functional consultants to act as advocates for them to users. And finally, the developers that can deliver innovations using the latest and greatest technology available to them. If one piece here is taken out, the whole innovation chain is not working.

In the meantime, SAP did a lot in the marketing of blockchain, NFTs, citizen developers and now AI. If only half of the effort spent on these topics would have been invested on enabling SAP consultants and developers. If there are enough people working on the SAP product to be able to deliver new features as well as working on the new feedack and demand that arises from this? We will see. What will help SAP here is that many times, the new technology is just an option and many users / developers will simply continue using the old technology. While this is not driving adoption, it lowers SAP’s support effort. Definitely not a win-win situation.

It is not only SAP that failed to invest. Of course, customers were not pushing SAP enough to invest more in the self-enablement. Partners also missed it. For instance, when SAP announced that add-ons must meet certain clean core criteria, they panicked. Yes, the requirements to go full ABAP Cloud are rather unrealistic to achieve in short time. But seriously, there are add-ons out there that are not using Fiori at all, or OData or CDS. Fiori – UI5 – is around in the SAP world for over 10 years, it is the UI technology of choice for SAP apps, and partners are surprised that their SAP Gui only add-ons are not fully aligned with ABAP Cloud. Without all of this, partners are not ready for RAP. You can deliver an exceptional experience using the features of the Fiori Launchpad. But how often are these used? The number of partners that missed updating their skills is higher than it should be. As consultants at partners are one of the main contract channels for SAP customer’s HR, the situation is not getting better for customers. (time to learn some German: Was Hänschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmer mehr)

Customers were not spearheading the new technologies. Of course, when their users, key users and functional consultants do not acquire the necessary knowledge and skills, no wonder they still ask for SAP apps developed in legacy technology. It is a risk to adopt something new. It takes time, money, and you need to open for failures. When customers are not willing to take the risks, they take the outdated approach. Take the Fiori UX again as an example. You can get a high level of individualization for Fiori apps for free, you can get notifications pushed to your FLP, interact with them without having to open the app. Combined with SSO and mobile access, this is a productivity booster and available for years. And how many are using this? What’s your main communication channel for workflow notifications? Is it E-Mail or push notifications? Customers find more than enough people that master the old technology and approaches. This looks like a win-win for them. But in the not-so-short time, this will backfire at them.

Now what?

And now? Well, it will take time. The 4^th wave is massive, not only regarding the number of customers and people that are part of it, but also regarding the time it will take. Until everyone is on S/4HANA it will take years. But also, not too long. 2030 is the ECC deadline and wave 4 should end one or two years before it. The aftermath of the 4^th wave will however be less motivating. It will be business as usual for most. Customers will take what is around to implement their base requirements. At lot of S/4HANA potential won’t be fostered. Once the S/4HANA migrations are over, there won’t be much more. People will be happy to leave it behind. Stuff works. Now leave me alone! SAP will continue to push their ERP vision and … this is when the lack of upskilling will really hit customers. The 2040 deadline is approaching fast. With it, 2035 will be the new 2025 regarding the last meaningful update time to T5/CLOUD (or Business Suite). And whoever is still doing SAP ERP like in the 90’s, early 2000’s: this time the change will hurt.